I wouldn’t get involved with someone deeply religious. I’d consider someone religious if they were sufficiently wishy-washy about it, though, e.g. people who are christian and believe in it at least enough to not call themselves atheists or agnostics but don’t really DO anything christian.

I never used social media that much and I can’t be bothered to hang around on Reddit in addition to Lemmy.

I vaguely remember someone saying that music is essentially brain massage. Pretty sure that was from a sample used in a song.

Arguably, being muscular is a male beauty standard. I would very much prefer it if men had more freedom of expression, though.

I really don’t think that kind of expectation is that common.

Yeah, and especially mental health. Not many people are really going to go that far (it’s a LOT of effort), but it’s so unattainable that even fit people often don’t feel good about themselves. Especially if you add all the makeup and doctored photos.

Average is plenty beautiful, though. At least in countries where ‘average’ doesn’t mean ‘severely over- or underweight’.

Beards are one of those things that are at least natural and have uses beyond beauty standards (e.g. some men have sensitive skin that easily gets irritated by shaving, and it protects the skin from sunlight, cold and drying out). If you don’t go all out styling it or having it impractically long, a trimmed beard is less effort than a clean shave (at least for men who have to shave daily to maintain the clean look).

Same on both of those!

Ultra low body fat, e.g. high fashion models, bodybuilders. You don’t see it that much in real life, but it’s pretty heavily promoted in media. Plus the dehydration thing for bodybuilders, I hate that ‘saran wrap’ look.

IME it’s very easy to get 1k kharma through commenting if you do it regularly. It’s practically guaranteed unless you’re actively trying to get downvoted or are only commenting in subs with extremely low engagement.

Fair enough, I guess that wasn’t the issue. Most user’s comments getting more upvotes than their posts is kind of normal, though, even if I’m not quite sure why. Lemmy has worked the same for me so far.

How did you determine that you were shadowbanned from Reddit, anyway?

So I got an idea, did you ever write comments or did you go straight to making posts? I think that might make a big difference; my main reddit interaction was always writing comments, not making posts.

That doesn’t necessarily refute any of your points about Reddit not being welcoming to new users, but at least it’s an explanation for why I never encountered the issues you had even though I never actively tried to avoid anything.

“grandfathered in” makes it sound like I’ve been using my account since 2010 or something. I made a new account every couple of years and never encountered an issue, though I always avoided the really popular subs.

I didn’t experience that when I still used reddit; I think this was already a thing to some extent, but it was very dependent on the specific subs (could be that non-English subs were just more lenient about this in general). Maybe there has been a policy change that made this more widespread? I didn’t get the impression that the admins actually care about bot accounts that pretend to be people as long as they’re not too obvious from the common user’s perspective (same as any other commercial social media site), but reddit is a popular target for web scrapers, and AI scrapers have been a plague recently that directly impacts a site’s ability to function without providing any benefit whatsoever.

Definitely. I don’t actually finish that many games, might as well savour it when I do. Usually has neat music, too. There’s a good chance I’ll skip after a couple of minutes if it’s very long, though.

I don’t disagree with OP at all, though. Just because it’s a minority doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Interesting read. “made Nazi death camps possible” seems a bit much, though - I don’t see how punch cards were absolutely necessary to carry out a census and send all the jews, romani etc. they could find to camps and eventually kill most of them.

It definitely makes me suspicious, considering they’re a standard ‘money above all else’ company (though they’re better at playing the long game than some other companies) operating in a fascist state. They don’t seem to abuse their power much, yet, but that can change rather quickly.

I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority. Suspicion of Red Hat was a major reason why systemd was so controversial.

I didn’t really seek out political content on the internet when I was a teenager (this was before the powers that be really discovered the internet as a propaganda tool), but I was already pretty leftleaning just from reading/watching traditional news, reading books and talking to people in person.

I do wonder if my views would have changed if I was more financially successful. It’s easy to believe that you deserve it when you have ‘made it’.